


Handled With A Chain

by charcoane



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-04
Updated: 2021-02-23
Packaged: 2021-03-02 05:54:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 9,269
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23900059
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/charcoane/pseuds/charcoane
Summary: Bucky parks himself on a chair and watches, unsettled and wary and battle ready — because here's Stark playing dutiful housewife and running dish soap and hot water over a teal blue mug, so clearly, all bets are off: Bucky’s gotta brace foreverything.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes & Steve Rogers, Steve Rogers/Tony Stark
Comments: 37
Kudos: 250





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title nabbed from Emily Dickinson's Much Madness Is Divinest Sense.

Bucky’s got several thoughts once he comes to a bewildered, dawdling halt a good twenty feet away from Steve’s porch. The first one is, surely this ain’t Steve’s porch. Because the porch isn’t attached to Steve’s idea of a place, and Steve had called it that. _Just keep on walking, you can’t miss it,_ Bucky had been told. _I’ll catch up._

Bucky had thought a cabin, maybe a cottage. He’d kindly rated Steve higher than an unethically conquered and appropriated bear den, but what Bucky’s looking at right now is a several thousand square foot monstrosity that brings to mind some of Bucky’s high-profile, wealthier targets: Russian oligarchs, European royals, political standard-bearers. Bucky pictures alcoves, parlors. He pictures columns, a sweeping staircase. His backpack slips off his shoulder and slumps down near his worn out sneakers, and Bucky knows instantly, mortification making his skin prickle, that he’s too dirty and bedraggled for whatever’s waiting for him inside.

* * *

Bucky’s dragging his feet and surreptitiously keeping his eyes peeled for surveillance cameras tucked behind nooks and crannies and branches when the front door sweeps open. A figure appears in the doorway, and Bucky lengthens his strides, meets it with an awkward half-smile and his hands tucked inside his pockets. Apologetic, quizzical words crawl up his throat, but then his eyes take in that fluorescent blue, carved into sun-kissed skin and caged in by a familiar brown robe, and they dissolve into breathy nothings in his mouth.

Bucky had anticipated this meeting. He’d pictured it: standing across from that gleaming red and gold on the opposite side of the battle field — or, if he was lucky, standing together, same side — but always partially sheltered behind the broad-shouldered, defensive silhouette of his best friend. He’d pictured fighting, maybe aliens, hell, a shit-talking raccoon; he’d never quite foreseen himself dressed in Wilson’s faded hand-me-downs and standing eye to eye with a Tony Stark who seemed equally worn out and out of sorts but wore it much better than Bucky.

Where Bucky is pallid, five o’clock shadow scattered across the bottom half of his face and all of his brittle, lackluster hair messily tucked out of his face and up into Steve’s cap, everything about Stark is vivid and perfectly put-together, like he’d stepped out of a goddamned painting: black hair, black eyes, black goatee slashed across a sharp jaw and around a red mouth. A tanned glow _in December._ Beyond that threshold, Bucky knows, lies polished teak, not a speck of dust.

“I think I took a wrong turn somewhere,” Bucky says, weakly.

“Barnes,” Stark says, and opens the door wide. “Do me a favor. _Don’t run._ ”

* * *

Stark guides Bucky through a presidential foyer and into a barren, uncharacteristically outdated kitchen. “My old man’s place,” Stark says, and his voice echoes, bounces back from the walls and into hollow space as though the whole house had been cored: furniture uprooted, high ceiling walls stripped, frayed carpets rolled up and lugged out into the open air. Stark opens a cupboard, and it’s empty. Moves one further down, and that’s empty, too. He pivots, draws towards to the sink like he’s being pulled, and Bucky parks his ass on a chair and watches, unsettled and wary and battle ready — because here's Stark playing dutiful housewife and running dish soap and hot water over a teal blue mug, so clearly, all bets are off: Bucky’s gotta brace for _everything._

He’s treated to a history lesson on the estate. His father, Stark explains, had secretly bought this cleverly camouflaged behemoth at the end of the war, when he’d been framed for selling weapons to the Soviets. A decade and a half later, after Stark Senior’s name had long been cleared, Stark’s mother had sequestered herself away here during the months she’d been pregnant, and given birth to yours truly right up there above their heads, second floor — at least that’s what Bucky gathers from Stark’s pointedly raised digit. The house had never been unoccupied for long: exiled European artists and intellectuals, prosecuted journalists and political refugees, they’d all been squatting here at some point or other. But they were all long since dead, and now the tables and chairs are gathering dust.

Stark sets the mug down, places it so that the white star painted on the front — and with it the smooth, fragile inside of Stark’s wrist — is facing Bucky. Apprehension unspools in Bucky’s gut, prickles the hair at the back of his neck — it’s too dauntless and aloof a gesture to be truly innocuous. Bucky’s eyes treck along Stark’s wrist, swipe up the open v of Stark’s robe, further up the naked stretch of his neck, then finally come to rest on his face. He looks starved, Bucky realizes; there are hollows in Stark’s cheeks, dark smudges under Stark’s eyes. What Bucky had taken for a healthy gleam was, now put into context, a thin veneer of cold sweat.

Bucky’s first mental leap is towards withdrawal, but that won’t account for Stark’s eyes, hard and steady, nor the damn near painful-to-look-at casual tension that’s coiled through Stark’s spine. Covert aggression, then? Steve hadn’t warned or asked Bucky, just steered him into Stark’s lair. Stark had clearly been warned, but had he been _asked?_

“I’ve been told you’re a flight risk,” Stark tells him, looking Bucky in the eyes as he says it. Bucky recuperates the bestowed attention until he sees something move out of the corner of his eye, and then his gaze flicks down to where Stark’s hand had come to rest on his own abdomen. Back up to Stark’s face, to the mirthless smile that’s now tugging on Stark’s lips as he continues, “But I trust you’ll take it easy on me.”

Bucky stares at Stark’s tense and solemn but still annoyingly devastating profile while Stark stares into empty space. A beat, then two, and Bucky’s no longer staring like a creep but Stark’s still running his hand ever so slightly over the swell of his own gut, and then it rushes through Bucky like an unforeseen, ferocious gust of cold wind, seals the breath inside his throat.

Because oh, Bucky thinks, feeling faint. Stark's not worried about Bucky, after all. 

* * *

Bucky hears Steve before he sees him, and then he smells Steve before he sees him. Steve’s feet are raking through the snow, climbing up the porch, and Bucky rises from the chair while Stark gathers up Bucky’s untouched mug; Bucky doesn’t remember crossing back through the foyer, flinging open the door, but he must have, and Bucky decides then and there that he's thoroughly sick of staring slack-jawed at sights his abused mess of a brain can’t comprehend, so he ploughs straight through disbelief and confusion and settles on resigned acceptance instead. 

“Is that our lunch?” Bucky deadpans, and Steve, that withdrawn, tight-lipped son of a bitch — frost in his beard, forearms stained with blood, a dead fucking deer slung over one broad shoulder — _beams._

“Help me carry this out back,” Steve says, ostensibly needing no help at all, and together they lope around the house, towards what Bucky is certain was once a garage but now functions as Steve's slaughterhouse, storing frozen meat instead of vintage cars. Steve tugs the dead slab off his shoulder, lets it fall ungraciously on the table with its limbs sprawled ever which way and its bones cracked, and only then does Bucky realize that the poor thing’s missing its head. 

He’d heard the deer whimpering and bawling when they’d disembarked the Quinjet, Steve explains; it had crashed through the ice and was trying to thrash and bite its way out. By the time Steve got there, it was half dead and frozen stiff, entombed in ice that was soaked through with blood. Steve had done the merciful thing and let his shield slash through the air, clean through the deer's neck.

Steve yanks a pocket knife out of his holster, turns it so the back of the blade’s clutched in his gloved palm while the cold, sleek top is pressed against the vulnerable inside of his wrist. “I’m saving the heart and liver for Tony,” Steve tells Bucky, perfunctory and matter-of-fact — the most nutritious and delicious parts of venison, Bucky will later discover, but right now he hones in on the way Steve enunciates Stark’s name: the forceful, plosive _T_ at the beginning mounting towards the elongated _o_ in the middle and dwindling down into the soft, tender _ny_ at the end. Steve must have given himself away every damn time he’d uttered Stark’s name — to Sam, to that redhead who won’t stop hounding Bucky with her annoyingly familiar green eyes. Surely they've both felt the same acute urge that Bucky feels now: to awkwardly face away, flustered, carving out a space for privacy where there's none. 

Steve shoves the deer — stiff from cold and rigor mortis — onto its back. "But the rest’s up for grabs,” Steve promises, smiling sideways at Bucky: soft and reassuring, not at all like someone who’s about to tear a fourteen inch gash into an innocent animal and scoop out its guts with his bare hands. 

* * *

Bucky turns his face up against the sun, breathes in mouthfuls of snow speckled air. He loses track of how long he stands there, eyes closed and mouth open, but eventually Bucky hears Steve stamp towards him through the snow, feels Steve’s gloved hand clamp down on his shoulder. 

“Buck,” Steve says, close to his ear, and soothes, “You’re okay.”

 _Am I_ , Bucky wants to ask, but keeps swallowing cold air instead, packs his lungs full with ice. The hand on Bucky’s shoulder squeezes, tugs Bucky backwards and around, and Bucky goes with it, easy and malleable, finding Steve’s gaze and holding it.

Steve cups the side of Bucky’s face, rough and grounding. He says, “It’s okay,” and Bucky feels Steve’s thumb press against his cheek, feels Steve’s fingers curve below his ear, warm against the back of Bucky’s skull.

Steve’s brows are furrowed, two small lines carved into the skin between. His eyes search Bucky’s, and then he cracks a weak smile.

He tells Bucky about Stark; about how Steve used to tote his quarry through the house, skin and gut them in the cellar. Stark would descend the stairs to the kitchen on the first floor — where Steve had taken to cleaning and trimming the organs — and every morning, Stark’s hand would go tight around the railing, the color draining from his knuckles and face. Steve would rush over and steady Stark just in time, guide him down the bottom steps, and Stark would smell the blood all over Steve and grow breathless and faint like a Victorian maiden whose corset had been laced too tight.

Which had nothing at all to do with Stark being naturally squeamish and everything with Stark falling victim to heightened hormones whilst functioning as a human incubator, Bucky reminds Steve, and watches memory become reality: the frost leaks out of Steve’s eyes, the rigor bleeds out of Steve’s face, and stood before Bucky with his head ducked low and his eyelids at half-mast isn’t the war-hardened, blunted cynic Bucky’s only just become accustomed to but the bushy-tailed, idealistic runt Bucky had herded unscathed into adulthood.

“Is it yours?” Bucky asks, and stares into a countenance Bucky has seen before too, but never in Steve — Bucky had seen it in hollow-cheeked, malnourished soldiers, dirt caked beneath their nails and smudged along the bridge of their nose, hungrily skimming the few and between letters from their omegas with bright, feverish eyes; he’d seen it in Gene Caffey, recounting his little run-in with Hedy Lamarr to a gaggle of semi-swacked soldiers, how she’d caught sight of him in his Army greens and sent him off with a kiss on the mouth and a hearty wave; Joseph Hayes, hopping on his sprained ankle, clutching a crushed envelope and hollering, “Hey, I got a baby girl! I’m a _father_!” 

“Yeah, Buck,” Steve says, soft and proud and quietly, agonizingly happy. “It’s mine.”

* * *

Bucky rarely sees Stark, and sees Stark and Steve together even less. Everywhere Bucky looks, he sees vast, empty spaces, dust piling up in corners and large chandeliers casting dark spiderwebs against colorless walls. He’ll crack a window and hear the wind howling through the gaps like a wolf searching for company, then slam it back shut before it pulls a wildly unreasonable answering howl out of his own throat. The forest — dense and endless, dormant and soaked below a thin sheet of melting ice — would remain unfazed, untouched by Bucky’s temporary madness, but the wind would swallow Bucky’s outburst whole and spit it back out, scornful and smug, fling it into the house. Steve would hear it, and Steve already has his hands full with one stir-crazy omega.

Steve hunts with Bucky, collects twigs and chops wood with Bucky, cooks food with Bucky; but the animal he takes apart and processes for Stark, the twigs and wood he makes a fire with to keep Stark warm, and the hot broth him and Bucky prepare in the evenings he pours down Stark’s throat first. Steve’s focus and devotion is absolute, unwavering and moderately alarming, and so it’s with great surprise that Bucky passes through the foyer, eyes the staircase, and realizes that a highly pregnant omega is liable to take a header down those steps and give themselves brain damage.

“That’s the point,” Steve says when Bucky asks him about it, and Bucky has half a mind to knock Steve unconscious, hoist Stark over one shoulder and make for the woods — but Steve's not finished. He goes on, “Back home I would have to pry his tools out of his hands and carry him out of the workshop kicking and screaming every damn day. He would have waddled his way down there even if he was fit to burst — and once it got to the point that he couldn’t walk, he would have sweet-talked JARVIS or Thor into ferrying him around. Here he’s got to stay put.”

And Bucky can't help but concede — a touch wildly — that maybe Wilson was right. Maybe him and Steve would be better served in therapy.

* * *

On some days, Bucky feels like a ghost: nameless and invisible, haunting a family home that’s so oddly and intimately familiar to him it might as well have been his own once. He recognizes the stove, knows the feel of the wool rug between his toes, against the soles of his feet. The paintings on the walls are decades old, older than Bucky — is it so far-fetched that he’s laid eyes on them before, stared at them just like this with his brows furrowed and the gums of his cheek caught between his teeth, his hands buried in the pockets of a borrowed sweater?

Months have trawled by, and gone with them has Bucky’s renitence to peek into unoccupied, vacant rooms, to touch his fingers to framed pictures — pictures in color, in narrowly salvaged black and white. The man with the dark moustache and self-satisfied smirk is Howard, Steve says. The blonde bombshell in the top right corner, who has her hands folded neatly over the mound of Howard’s shoulder — black coal around her eyes, her hair artfully arranged into what’s since been dubbed a messy beehive? Stark’s mother.

“She looks awfully young here,” Bucky remarks, by which he means too young for a man who’s clearly already in his mid forties, and Steve concurs with knowing eyes and the bones of his jaw thrown into sharp relief. Bucky might have seen her around once, Steve suggests.

“No,” Bucky responds, and Steve’s shoulders lift in a rueful shrug.

“Worth a try — you always were more likely to remember a pretty face,” Steve teases.

The hell of it is, Steve ain’t wrong. Photographs of Maria Stark are dispersed all over the manor, nailed to shadowed walls and poised on remote surfaces as if they’d been intentionally placed there for a profoundly creepy Easter egg hunt. Maria Stark in her twenties, Maria Stark in her thirties. Maria Stark before giving birth to Tony, and after. Bucky knows from Tony that writers had been invited to spend a few months here free of charge: they’d slept in Maria Stark’s bed, soaked themselves in her bathtub; they’d had their paws all over her clothes, left fingerprints on her silverware. Then they’d amassed all their research, and each poured it into a historically inaccurate but convincing autobiography.

Bucky’s no liar — he’s sure he’s never seen any of the Maria Starks before in his life. But still there’s something about her eyes — round and brown — that pins him in place every damn time. The immaculate shape and slope of her nose, the bow of her lips — all Bucky’s got are still images, and yet he knows the way her lips move around words when she talks, the way her nose scrunches when she laughs.

For one harrowing, deeply nerve-wracking moment he considers the entirely insane notion that the Winter Soldier might have been some sort of part-time Don Juan, carrying on a secret affair with Stark’s mother — but then Stark himself walks into Bucky’s line of sight, side-steps Steve’s greedy hands with a barely suppressed smile and a half-hearted reprimand on the tip of his tongue, and Bucky thinks, thank _God._

His relief lasts him through the week, until one fateful evening when Steve sends Bucky into the bedroom Steve shares with Tony, to fetch one of Tony’s numerous furs — and Bucky’s eyes stray towards the framed photograph on Tony’s bedside table.


	2. Chapter 2

Bucky says, “Steve,” but it falls on deaf, busy ears. Bucky repeats, “Steve,” and this time Steve turns, plucks the fur from Bucky’s numb fingers with grateful eyes.

“I remember her,” Bucky says, and something about the way there’s absolutely no color in Bucky’s voice or face must snag Steve’s attention, because he flings the fur onto an adjacent chair, asks, “What was that?”

“The photograph,” Bucky tells him, hoarse and wretched. “On Tony’s bedside table? It’s the most recent one he has of her, isn’t it? I know her. I remember.”

“You said you’d never seen her before,” Steve reminds Bucky, but he’s also gone very, very still.

“Not when she was young,” Bucky tries to make Steve understand, because it’s all so clear to him now: Bucky’s never seen Maria Stark when she was in her twenties or in her thirties, and all he ever recognized when he looked into her eyes or at her smile was her remnant — her son. But he also remembers an unlit, empty road. He remembers dark skid marks across the pavement, hauling a white-haired man out of the driver’s seat by the neckline of his jacket like a dog by its collar. He remembers the feel of a soft, fragile throat swelling — and collapsing — in the tight shackle of his grip.

“I know her,” Bucky croaks, and Steve curls his hand around Bucky’s bicep, guides him gently through the front door and out into the backyard.

* * *

It pours out of Bucky in an uncontrollable, muddled stream, like a gushing wound. He’d made use of his rifle to halt the car, Bucky tells Steve, but the targets he’d killed with his bare hands. Steve listens, keeps Bucky steady — he says, “It wasn’t you,” his arm solid and immovable around Bucky’s waist, and Bucky fists his hands in Steve’s shirt, insists, “But I did it, I _did_.”

Because he remembers the pearls around her neck. He remembers drawing his fist back, driving Stark’s skull into the smooth chrome of his fancy car. He remembers the dark stain of blood on Stark’s upper lip, and finding a single suitcase — sitting neat as a package, front and center — in Stark’s trunk.

“I can’t stay here,” Bucky concludes, and Steve says, “Buck, listen to me,” in a voice that’s a shade louder than a whisper, his arm tightening around Bucky’s waist.

“There’s no one who can look out for you back stateside,” Steve admits, once he’s got Bucky’s attention. Bucky’s mind immediately jumps to Wilson, to Steve’s red-haired confidant, but Steve tells him — sounding as regretful as Bucky feels — that it’s not an option: they're both gone, away on private business. 

“You gotta stay here,” Steve tells Bucky, and he releases his grip on Bucky’s waist, lowers him gently to the ground. Bucky wishes the earth would open up and swallow him whole, wishes he could dig a pit for himself in the dirt and pile it closed. But Steve would vehemently put a stop to both, and so all that’s left for Bucky to do is kneel: to feel the warmth leach out of his hands and the wet soak through the legs of his pants, the wind lashing harsh and cold against the side of his face. 

Unbelievably, it’s Steve who says, “I’m sorry.” He walks back towards Bucky, crushes dainty flowers underneath his feet as he goes. Then he cups his hand — warm and compassionate — around the back of Bucky’s skull. Bucky lifts his head and realizes it’s gone pitch black around them, the trees looming dark and menacing in the distance.

“We have to keep this quiet, Buck,” Steve says, crestfallen and apologetic. Bucky can’t make out Steve’s eyes, but he sees enough: Steve towers dark and tall and wilted above Bucky, like a cracked willow that’s only just become aware of the weight foisted onto him by its many branches, its leaves. When Steve confesses — rueful and reluctant — that Stark’s miscarried before, he does so quietly, like it’s the first time he’s said the words out loud; like he’d broken a promise to Stark saying them out loud.

“He’s not going to take it well,” Steve tells Bucky, tries to make him understand with the same anxiety and insistence Bucky had discerned in himself, minutes earlier. “Please, Bucky,” Steve pleads with him, openly and contrite, and Bucky leans back into Steve’s hand, allows Steve to take his weight with a defeated nod and his eyes closed.

* * *

Steve’s a terrible liar, even when it counts: face-to-face with a completely flabbergasted and yelling Colonel Phillips whose mouth seemed to hoard a worryingly excessive amount of spit, being eyeballed by the watery-eyed pharmacist right around the corner from Steve’s apartment who’d known his ma’s prescription by heart. Caught red-handed, Steve never so much attempted to talk or lie his way out as he simply doubled down — the penicillin, he told old Mister Saverin, he stole because his ma needed it to live, and he wasn’t gonna let her die just because he couldn’t afford it; and at Colonel Phillips he yelled right back, albeit with a substantially less amount of spit, because he’d made it clear to Phillips that he wasn’t gonna leave his fellow men behind to be tortured by Nazis, not when he could do something about it — and do something about it he did, didn’t he? 

Borne down with such solid and convincing moral reasoning, all they could do was bluster (Colonel Phillips), then let Steve off with a gentle tap on the wrist (Colonel Phillips, Mister Saverin). Bucky had witnessed it all — first-hand, his eyes wide — and begrudged Steve none of it: Steve’s ma had recovered, bright-eyed and apologetic on Steve’s behalf, and Bucky himself had died two days later in the Alps instead of in a shitty torture chamber, smack dab in enemy territory.

Bucky doesn’t begrudge Steve his decision now, either — not when it’s informed by Steve’s usual amalgamation of good intentions and pragmatism. There’s no going back and undoing Bucky murdering Stark’s parents, and revealing the truth to Stark now would only get more people in Stark’s family hurt. Bucky can’t go be by his own, not when he’s as infamous and unstable as he is now, but he’s not so unstable as to pose a threat to Stark’s well-being. And so Steve forges onwards, passes Stark his food with steady hands and a warm smile, aims clear, reassuring eyes at Bucky over Stark’s shoulder, and Bucky looks at Stark and can’t help but think he’s a different creature altogether, so much different from Colonel Phillips and Mister Saverin, and Bucky's gripped with foreboding so acute he can't eat at all, the knot inside his stomach winding unbearably tight. 

* * *

April melts into May, and the more things come alive inside the rustling lushness of the forest, the bigger Stark’s stomach swells, the shallower his breathing becomes. Bucky doesn’t need to be a doctor to nose out the culprit — every time Stark breathes, his chest rises, and the jagged lines of that triangular piece of metal press flush against the thin fabric of his shirt. It had taken Bucky one look — and a knee-jerk wince — to recognize it for what it was: the post hoc workmanship of someone who’d cracked open Stark’s body, cleaved his chest cavity clean in two, then tried to callously and clumsily put it back together. Not completely unlike Bucky’s arm, alien and cold. In other words, a lousy bandaid.

Stark’s discomfort is so palpable Bucky can taste it in the back of his throat, so potent it’s seemed to seep into the walls. The floors creak, the house moans. Stark pushes away Steve’s hand-processed meat, gnaws on cold celery like an exceptionally pitiful, worn out rabbit. He white-knuckles cups, armrests, counters. Several times a night, Bucky’s pulled out of his rest by footsteps — Steve, fetching Stark whatever he needs — and running water — Stark, running himself a hot bath. Almost every morning, Bucky has to make do with a cold shower. 

Steve confides in Bucky, worried and drawn: used to be, Stark woke up with coffee, fell asleep with sedatives. He’d make it through the day digesting a cocktail of painkillers and SSRIs, and now he’s down to only SSRIs. Any additional fat Steve forks into Stark’s mouth won’t settle on his bones. Stark’s perpetually cold; he sleeps beneath a heap of furs, sleeps like he’ll never wake up. He sleeps through hunger, through thirst. Every few hours, Steve tells Bucky, he’ll roll Stark over and check between his legs for blood.

“You need to call for a doctor,” Bucky says, and Steve shakes his head, thumbs a stray tear from the corner of his eye.

“I called for several,” Steve admits, his voice husky, bone-tired. “They fed me platitudes about how exhaustion’s a common symptom during pregnancy, and to get back to them if he starts getting worse.”

“Huh,” Bucky comments, and then he suggests, tentatively, "Maybe they're right, and he’s just gotta ride it out?”

Steve mulls that over, troubled and silent. He croaks, “Is it bad that I wish he never carried at all?”

“I don’t think it’s bad to wish your omega wasn’t in discomfort or pain,” Bucky offers, and Steve cracks a short-lived smile that doesn’t reach his eyes.

* * *

Bucky’s been with Steve and Stark for months and months, and so far, his luck’s held: all he’d ever run into were shallow kisses, assuaging touches. Bucky had walked into the kitchen once and nearly turned tail when he found Stark white-knuckling the counter, Steve’s arm hard at work behind him — but then Stark’s eyes flew open, Steve caught sight of Bucky over Stark’s shoulder, and Stark stepped aside to expose a fully clothed, unruffled Steve who’d — oh — only been pressing the hard knolls of his knuckles into Stark’s sore back, nothing to see here. 

There are days, few and far between, where Bucky’s presence goes unheeded: he’d be standing right there and Steve’s eyes would still stray, one arm reaching out to seize a nearby Stark, reel him in close — on one memorable occasion, all the way down onto Steve’s lap. But they’d leap apart just as fast, flustered and lingering and yet adamant to keep their intimacy where it belongs: between themselves, behind closed doors. 

It leaves Bucky on edge, torn between gratitude and indecision and guilt. Steve and him are no strangers to making eyes at any pretty thing that'll have them in public and then taking them apart in private, but right now Steve’s eyes are overflowing, all artless appreciation and scarcely controlled restraint. Stark walks into the living room in a three-piece suit that’s open at the collar and tight around his bump, and Steve shifts over on the couch, leaves a sizeable spot for Stark to slot himself into.

It’s one of those rare moments: should Bucky leave? pay them no mind? Bucky keeps his eyes fastened to the TV and his form languid and sure, and then Steve reaches over, unbuttons Stark’s waistcoat. He pops open the button that draws Stark's dress shirt tight and uncomfortable over the mound of his stomach, then — redundantly — pops open another. Bucky turns his head — watches Steve lower his, push his mouth into the gap of Stark’s undone shirt. Stark rests his hand tenderly on the back of Steve’s head, his eyes heavy-lidded, his gaze considering. 

And Bucky gets it, loud and clear. He levers himself up, and wordlessly makes his exit.

* * *

Bucky gives them about half an hour, not because he has no faith in Steve’s ability to last but because it leaves Steve with more than enough time to gather Stark up in his arms, move whatever they’d been about to do to a more discrete location. It’s not until Bucky advances towards the living room and ducks back through the doorframe that he realizes Steve’s a depraved fucking _perv_ who’d apparently taken Bucky’s retreat as permission to tip Stark over — to lay Stark out on his side and hover tight and close behind him, fuck him slow and indulgent on the couch for all the world to see.

Bucky takes a giant, instinctive leap backwards and behind the door, presses his back to the wall and his flesh and blood hand against his fluttering, startled heart. He’s awash with cold shock, run through with unwanted, reflexive arousal — it’s the most primitive, humiliating experience a human can have, to be unwittingly walking into someone’s most unguarded, private moment, to see a cock slide into a cunt and realize, oh, god, he has to sit down and have _breakfast_ with them tomorrow.

Bucky had only caught one glimpse and yet that glimpse had bared it all: what Steve once possessed in length but lacked in width the serum more than made up for, and Stark’s taking Steve easy, taking him well; his dress shirt is rucked up to his armpits and his pants are discarded altogether, and he's hitching out those appreciative, fragile moans that close up Bucky’s throat, make Bucky _yearn_. 

Then Bucky hears Steve complain, hears him say, “C’mon, Tony, don’t do that,” and there’s a scuffle.

Bucky listens, his heart in his throat, his ears pricked, and Tony’s voice rings out, muffled and bristling, demanding, “Don’t _what_.”

“Not if you don’t mean it,” comes Steve’s voice, admonishing, murmuring. Bucky peeks behind the doorframe, sees Steve lever himself up on trembling, unsteady legs, his cock hard and heavy and leaking in his hand; sees Stark follow, clumsy, leaden with arousal.

Steve clambers down onto his knees — and Bucky’s never seen him move so ungainly, so artlessly, as though he’s hurting. One of Steve’s hands is cupped around his balls — holding himself at bay, Bucky realizes, mortified — and the other reaches out, pushes Stark in place and his thighs apart. 

Bucky doesn't stay and watch Steve bury his face between Stark's legs, no doubt warming Stark up on his tongue. Instead Bucky peels his back from the wall and slinks away for the second time that night, shame rising sharp and thick like tar in his throat.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> An interlude, if you will.

Bucky’s perfectly content to spend the next few hours — days — in what’s since become his room, watching the paint flake off the walls and the sun climb westwards across the sky, but then it’s the very next day and Bucky’s only just peeled his eyes open when someone raps what must surely be fucking _brass_ knuckles against the brittle wood of his bedroom door.

The door cracks open, and stepping into Bucky’s room, into the triangular patch of sunlight that’s spilled onto Bucky’s floor, is Steve. Of course it’s Steve: not a hair out of place, neutral-colored clothes stretched conspicuously tight over muscles. When Steve sees Bucky sprawled in bed — barefoot, bleary-eyed, knuckling sleep from the inner corners of his eyes — his eyes go fond and one end of his mouth kicks up in an amused, mirthful smile.

Then Steve curls his hands around the foot-end of Bucky’s bed, cants his head to catch and hold Bucky’s gaze, and says, breaking the news to Bucky gently, “There’s a goat on the front porch.”

Bucky — his face warped in a bewildered, sun shy scowl — frowns so hard his forehead aches. He combs his hair back out of his face with his metal hand, weeds out the loose, damaged strands. He slurs, “Am I awake?”

“Sure are, pal,” Steve tells him, and reaches out to grasp Bucky’s flesh and blood hand, heaves him up into sitting. Bucky groans, low and quiet. He curls over, drops his face into his hands, and scrubs roughly at his face — peeling off the sleep, the aridity. When he next looks up, ruddy-faced but dry-eyed, Steve's standing watch by the window, his arms huge and folded. 

"Still there," Steve muses out loud, contemplative. 

“A goat,” Bucky says through a cotton mouth, his voice a rasp.

Steve unfolds his arms, slants his eyes first towards Bucky, then back towards the window. “Come see,” he offers simply, and doesn’t wait for Bucky to put himself to rights, march after him, before he prowls out the door and down the stairs.

* * *

It’s a female goat — a doe — and it doesn’t twitch a muscle as Steve and Bucky shoulder open the front door and trundle, warm and lazy and heavy-eyed from sleep, onto the rickety porch. Steve is looming, broad-shouldered and cool-eyed and casting a long, intimidating shadow, and still the doe lies passive and unmoving, its oblong snout canted up to hold Steve fast with its eyes: crossed, pale blue. 

"Aw, hell," Bucky murmurs. His eyes pass over the brown flecks — scattered over an otherwise white coat — then swoop down to measure the tight, bulging gut that spills out between the doe’s folded hooves and across half the width of the porch. Glancing sideways to Steve, Bucky sees that even he’s thawed, softened, cupped his hand around the doe's chin.

“Whose are you,” Steve wants to know, and Bucky thinks it’s a fair question: he looks and looks, swings his gaze far and beyond, but all he’s ever seen for months and months were trees, and it’s all he sees now, too. Him and Steve have quietly picked their way past dens, peered up into tree hollows, kept their distance from buzzing and crackling beehives, but never have they ever come across anything remotely resembling a _human_ habitat: a cabin, a cottage, a farm. The doe might as well have crawled out of the newly warmed earth to the balmy surface alongside all the other flowers and insects, back when winter mellowed into spring.

“We better take it inside,” Bucky voices out loud, low and rusty. “It might have run from something.”

“Like this?” Steve questions, tipping his chin towards the doe’s crammed, prenatal belly — but then he crouches low regardless. He ropes his arms around the doe’s shoulders and rump, heaves her up against his chest. From his vantage point Bucky can see her gut stretch, dangling heavy and large and taut, and he scrambles forward to help, gathers the hovering, delicate load in his arms. They move as one, and don’t fit through the door. Steve shoos Bucky away, carries the doe in sideways — like he’d done Stark’s piano — and Bucky follows after him, sweat beading on his neck and pooling in his armpits, actually wringing his hands.

Steve’s steps falter. Bucky, off-balance, face-plants between Steve’s shoulders. He reluctantly lifts his face out of Steve’s warm shirt, then cranes his neck half an inch, peers over Steve's shoulder. 

And winces, seeing Stark’s wide, horror-stricken eyes, his white-knuckled grip on the railing.

“It’s not what you think,” Steve rushes to reassure him.

The doe, of course, chooses that moment to jolt alive, ejecting a damning, ear-shattering bleat.

* * *

Bucky doesn’t know what the hell it is — the hormonally induced protectiveness that sticks to Stark like a scent and makes even Steve hunch his shoulders and lower his eyes, or the solidarity of motherhood that evidently transcends species — but whatever it is, it has the pregnant doe seesawing out of Steve’s arms and clambering, drunkenly and weakly and urgently, towards Stark.

Stark, who's apparently so far into his pregnancy he’ll willingly mother and nurture even a fully grown and narcoleptic goat, intercepts the struggling animal with a wide-eyed wonder and thoughtfulness that makes Bucky’s teeth hurt. He lowers himself to sitting, one hand cupped protectively around his swollen belly, and — clearly more perceptive and sensitive than Steve and Bucky put together — lifts his chin so the doe can burrow close, hide her long, weird face in the shadowed hollows of his throat.

Then Stark folds one arm around the back of the doe’s neck, gathers her even more firmly into the warm, safe shelter of his body. His eyes, looking beyond the doe’s snout to Steve and Bucky, are two black flints, hard and challenging.

“We’re not eating this one,” Stark declares, putting his foot down.

Bucky, because he's out of his depth, looks sideways to Steve. Immediately after he realizes he's a fucking idiot for looking to Steve for guidance, because Steve — so help him God — has hit a new low and melted over what's Tony more or less cuddling a fucking goat, every inch of Steve's normally so tightly controlled face gone pathetically, shamefully slack, gleaming with disproportionate tenderness, with ill-timed want.

"Of course we’re not,” Steve reassures Tony, all breathless and earnest and doting, hopelessly indulgent.

Bucky's eyes roll heavenward. 

* * *

“You don’t have to do this,” Steve argues with Bucky, trailing him through the backyard, through the woods. Ever since the doe’s arrival, Bucky’s in constant motion; he's got to work fast — build an outdoor shelter, because Stark's got a sensitive nose and the doe's stinking up the whole house — and while Steve’s looking on with the same tongue-tied wonder that’s been hounding Bucky for the better part of the year, Tony turns out to be a bottomless well of knowledge and helpful advice.

It occurs to Bucky that — if it weren’t for Tony's medically imposed bedrest, those additional forty pounds Steve had remorselessly foisted onto his bones — Tony would have remade the dozen or so acres of his backyard into highly secured and richly vegetated grazing ground for livestock all on his own, sleeves rolled up to his elbows and jeans mottled with grass stains. Tony was already one step ahead of Bucky when he’d coaxed the — as it turned out, dehydrated — doe into lipping up half a gallon of water, then brandished his phone and arranged for several tons of high-quality hay to be jettisoned onto their door-stoop. As far as Steve had been concerned, that was Stark's job done; he'd herded Tony onto the nearest outrageously plush surface and now it's fallen to Bucky to sweet-talk and lure the goat into a more suitable area, to feed her hay and monitor her teets and —

“Jesus, Buck,” Steve swears weakly, wide-eyed and faint.

— reach a hand into her, rummaging around for her kidling’s nearest limb and tugging, gently, until something gives and the doe heaves out a weakened, guttural bleat and a blood-matted stretch of fur comes pouring out onto a conveniently placed mound of hay.

* * *

Being wrist-deep in the doe hasn’t brought her and Bucky any closer; if anything it’s only made her more leery of Bucky, and all the more attached to Stark: sidling up to Stark with her ears perked up whenever he’s found the strength and will to make it down to the first floor — which is less and less these days — and locking blue doe eyes with strong brown contenders until Stark reaches out, heavy-lidded and aching, running the back of his hand feather-light across her chest, her front legs. 

The doe’s gaggle of kidlings, on the other hand, Bucky can’t shake loose. One will traipse close and the others will stagger after it with shaky hooves, a small landslide that almost always ends with Bucky cross-legged on the ground, one kidling after the other pouring into his lap and stomping all over each other and Bucky’s groin.

It’s on one such occasion that Bucky’s enhanced hearing picks up Stark’s voice, idly remarking to Steve, “He’s good with them.”

“He is, isn’t he?” Steve says back immediately, quiet and conspiratorial, and when Bucky turns his head and looks, Steve’s looking back at Bucky — amused, at ease — and Stark’s looking at Steve — all lowered lashes and quietly watchful, an intensity to his eyes that could sear the flesh from bones. 


	4. Chapter 4

Bucky’s tracking Steve through the woods while Steve's tracking next week's dinner, his shield fastened to his back and his knife tucked into his boot. The shield, Bucky notices, spans the absurdly broad width of Steve’s shoulders, and yet Steve's still light on his feet, delicately stepping over twigs, the plundered carcass of some small animal. The latter earns Bucky a meaningful glance over the shoulder, and Steve’s measured trot turns into a composed prowl, his hand twitching towards the knife.

Bucky trails after Steve — compliant, unarmed. Rarely does Steve need Bucky to run interference: once Bucky had stood idly by while Steve was dangling to and fro on the back of a fucking _bear_ , Steve’s scraped up arms locked around the bear’s neck in a chokehold, his grin wild and huge. Bucky had lowered himself to a cross-legged hunch on the ground and his face into the warm cup of his hands, smothered his hot, vaguely deranged laughter in the grimy skin of his palms. By the time Steve had touched his hand to Bucky’s shoulder, the bear had already gone tellingly silent.

Steve’s eyes had been bright, his chest heaving, lungs filling and emptying. Bucky had thought, who the fuck _are_ you? before he'd realized he was seeing Steve for the first time, in his entirety: this was who Steve had been along, this was all his former disease-ridden body couldn’t hope to keep contained.

The vast blue of the sky is dimming and burning over into pink and orange when Steve’s footsteps finally falter, his arm reaching backward towards Bucky to signal him to a halt. Bucky’s breath seizes in his throat, and then Steve’s breast pocket buzzes.

Bucky blinks, lashes sweeping closed, and within that tenth of a second Steve’s managed to shake off all that inborn confidence. His hands go to the zipper of his jacket, tearing it open, and then he’s reaching inside, fumbling, tugging. He lifts out what looks like a pager, his hands clumsy, and Bucky can’t see Steve’s face but he can see the pulse pounding in Steve’s throat, can see the color drain from his skin.

“Steve,” Bucky says, tentative, “what is it?”

Steve stands stock-still, and then he explodes into motion the same way a flock of birds would if someone had fired a bullet into the dense crown of a tree.

* * *

Bucky sways, clutching his sore arm because Steve had almost _bowled him over_ shoving past him, what the hell, and then he thinks of that pager, buzzing, Steve’s blood-drained face. Bucky rasps, “Oh, god,” and he’s no more graceful than Steve when he books it back through the woods and towards where Stark is — resting, bed-bound, hopefully whole.

* * *

Stark is in one piece but he looks like he’s bursting at the seams, skin stretched tight over his swollen belly and his ribs protruding, the arc reactor invasive and flaring an alarmingly luminous blue. The latter would have probably looked flattering if Stark had been well, but right now he’s laboring, aching so deep and bad it’s welded his jaw shut, driven the blood into his cheeks.

Steve's taken Tony’s grasping hands, drawn near and huddled close, breathing Tony’s air. He's smoothing his thumbs over Tony’s knuckles, and Bucky can’t see Steve’s face but he knows Steve must want so badly to card Stark’s hair out of his face, to reach up and wipe at the sweat beading along Stark’s hairline with his bare hand. 

“You’re alright, I’m right here,” Steve rasps at him, already overcome, his voice full. He says, in the delegating tone of a man who knows he'll have to be pried from Stark's side with a fucking crowbar, “We gotta call Bruce.”

“Already did,” Tony tells him, white-knuckling Steve’s hands, and there’s a tide in his throat: his breath is shallow, cresting, heaving in and out. 

Steve asks, all banked anxiety and the need to soothe, if Tony wants to take a moment and soak in the tub, because the warm water’s helped before. He stares and stares at Tony’s wan, twisting face, his hands on Tony’s skin while Tony paces the room, then sits down and winces all over, asking Steve to hoist him back upright. Tony bargains with a deity Bucky knows he doesn’t believe in, breathes objections. At one point his face goes slack and his breath dissolves in his throat and his eyes blow wide and glassy, and it takes Steve going down to his knees, peeling Tony’s pants down over his hips and ass and thighs — so excruciatingly intimate Bucky’s prickling all over, remembering when he'd last seen Steve breathing over Tony's crotch like that — for Bucky to realize that Tony’s water just broke.

Tony fists one hand in the bottom end of his shirt, holds it over his sex. His other hand is braced on Steve’s shoulder, his fingers closed tight around muscle and bone, and when he looks over Steve’s head towards Bucky — rooted in the doorway, his mouth parted — Bucky knows Tony’s not seeing him at all.

* * *

It’s a difficult labor, Bucky can tell: there’s none of that sweet cajoling and bubbly pep-talk, no breath-held anticipation. Steve’s dauntless and physical in a way that’s completely at odds with how he’d been when Bucky had lent a hand to their goat pressing out her kidlings: he muscles his way between Stark’s legs, stares open-eyed and earnest into the rare, blatant ruin of him. It's only taken Steve minutes to put aside all the jittery nerves of a personally involved civilian and become inflexible and flat all over, reaching in with his fingers to check how far Tony's dilated, curling his hand around Tony’s ankle and squeezing, holding firm and rigid against the press of Tony’s heel against his shoulder — Tony bearing down and pushing, alarmingly mute and drained, his lashes fluttering and arc reactor humming. 

“You’re doing so good,” Steve praises, and Bucky looks at him and knows he’s never meant anything more, will never mean anything as fervently and deeply as he does now. Tony’s giving Steve his whole world, and he’s doing it unmedicated and handicapped, bleeding and tearing and writhing with unknowable, reshaping pain. So of course Steve presses his lips to Tony’s knee, reverent and tender all over with what he’s feeling, of course he’s silently crying — tears coasting wet and salty down the slope of his nose, dripping off his chin.

Bucky’s knees and feet are aching by the time a quiet whine cuts through the tension, swelling to a shrill cry. Steve gathers the shrivelled, milky, blood-red heap between Tony's thighs into his arms, Tony sighing and Steve’s face and hands soaked while Bucky tentatively inches closer with a towel. Steve passes the babe over, and Bucky — quivering, his heart in his throat — wipes her clean, runs the warmed cloth over her wrinkled, flushed everything, marvelling at her paper-thin skin, her fragile ribcage, the flutter of her tiny heart. 

He distantly hears Steve tending to Tony — all that single-minded doting, oscillating between reassuring and urgent — and Bucky doesn’t know what makes him look up from the baby and into Tony’s face, but it’s a good thing he does — because Stark's fading, eyes rolling up and hands going slack. 

* * *

“I had to help deliver quite a few babies when I was hiding away India,” Banner says, mild and mellow, stripping off his gloves and tossing them towards the pile in the corner: mounting with bloodied bedsheets and towels and even a swaddled placenta.

“Some of them were bleeding more heavily than this,” Banner goes on, moving to stand by the opened window, “and yet they’ve all come to. He’ll be fine.”

Banner might as well have been talking to the wall for all that Steve’s acknowledging him, sitting by Tony’s bedside with his hands slack in his lap and his eyes vacant and static. He reeks of stale sweat and blood that’s come from deep inside Tony, the skin underneath his nails crusted with it. Bucky, still holding the baby, had told him to go wash up, but Steve had ignored him, sitting motionless and unresponsive, mute now that all the urgency’s died away and there’s nothing left for him to do.

“Do you want to hold her?” Bucky asks, hoping to pull Steve back, to distract him from having become familiar with the breath-stopping imminence of losing Tony for good — but Steve’s still recovering, still dizzy and smarting from being run through with crushing despair, and he scrubs his hands over his face, wards Bucky off.

Bucky catches Banner’s eye, and Banner shrugs and offers him a sympathetic grimace, the wind tousling his dark hair.

* * *

Tony’s eyes open and breathe life into Steve: he crawls close, shaky with relief and feeling every bit as emptied by all blood loss as Tony had been, and then he cups his hands around Tony’s face, presses a tremulous kiss to Tony’s lips, to his forehead, over each of Tony’s eyelids. He’s stooped over Tony, his insides ransacked and his elbows on either side of Tony’s head, looking to anyone present like he’s holding his entire world in his hands, and Tony blinks tiredly up into Steve’s face.

Then Tony croaks, “Here's me thinking you’d seize your chance and make off with your own little make-shift family,” and throws his hand out to where Bucky is still cradling these crazy people’s daughter.

Bucky's thoughts grind to a halt.

Dimly, he hears Banner remark, “Dear _lord_ , Tony,” — low and dry, as though somehow, against all odds, Tony's managed to outdo even himself. 


	5. Epilogue

“What do you mean, he _threw you out?”_ Bucky yells into the phone, but the reception on Steve’s end is so bad that Bucky might have come across sounding balanced and sane instead of unhinged. It would certainly explain Steve’s glib reply, saying, “Yeah, I’ve been setting up camp outside. It’s not so bad — there’s a stream not so far from here, did you know? I’ve caught Tony a few trouts—”

With your bare hands? Bucky is dying to ask, wide-eyed, but Steve goes on, musing, “I figure it’s a nice change from all the red meat. He’s been threatening to go vegan once we’re back stateside.”

Then Steve tells Bucky that it must be an empty threat, because Tony is still nursing, and such a drastic change in diet can’t be good for the baby. Could Bucky ask Bruce for him? He’d look it up himself, Steve says, his voice dry, but as he’s sure Bucky knows, he can't access the Internet.

From the moment Bucky had poured the baby into the cradle of Stark’s arms, Stark’s eyes and hands had neither wavered nor let her go. Any time Bucky looked him over, Stark would be either standing by the window or sitting back on the couch, cupping the back of the baby’s head — so soft and vulnerable it had made Bucky shudder, holding her — in the palm of his hand. Stark had been gleaming and soft all over, from his eyes to his mouth to his hands. The only tension, Bucky deduced, was pooling in the back of Tony’s neck: knotted and angry red, no doubt aching from constantly turning at an angle and bending, Tony making sure to establish eye contact and a steady rapport with his daughter at all times.

Bucky’s never seen anyone be so indulgent and sweet, caught in the luminous throes of motherhood — not even Steve, and looking at Steve these days is making Bucky’s teeth hurt he’s so adoring. It had made Bucky a little reckless, a little desperate and selfish. He’d seen Tony obligingly feed one finger into the baby’s grasping, clutching fist, cooing at her while she did her absolute best to squeeze the blood from Tony's pointer, scratch his skin loose with her nails. Bucky had leaned into Steve, guilty and impatient, and murmured that the best time to confess to Stark about his parents was probably now, Stark was so high on endorphins Bucky guarantees he'd be over it in _seconds._

“He’s nursing,” Steve had protested, wounded, and Bucky had scrubbed his hands over his face, felt all that shame and regret crawling like a thousand insects underneath his skin, eating him alive.

Banner had tapped Bucky’s shoulder, eyebrows drawn together in a frown. “Hey,” Banner had said. “You wanna hitch a ride with me back to New York?”

“Not yet,” Steve had interjected then, looking meaningfully at Tony’s trembling hands, his slumped shoulders. They’d stayed for a week or so more, Bucky tending to the goats and Banner monitoring Tony’s blood pressure and heart rate. The warmth had been back in Tony's face when Bucky and Banner finally walked up the ramp of the Quinjet — Bucky’s herd of goats obediently bringing up the rear while Tony was standing back with Steve, gingerly lifting up the baby’s tiny arm so she could wave all these interlopers goodbye.

“I never thought one of us would get to have this,” Banner was saying next to Bucky, sounding rueful and awed. It had been the last Bucky had seen of Steve: standing next to Tony, smiling so hard and openly the muscles in his face must have ached with it.

“This is my fault,” Bucky croaks into the phone now, pressing his forehead to the wall. Steve tuts at him, gently chiding.

“Tony and I both agree it’s my fault,” Steve says, and Bucky imagines him running his hand over the back of his own neck, repentant and embarrassed. Bucky imagines Steve cloaked and sleeping in the furs of butchered wildlife, curling up at night to preserve his warmth, then waking up and dumping the processed meat at his mate’s door in the mornings — still providing for them and safeguarding them from the outside, hard-headedly waiting out Tony’s well-earned ire.

“I’m just hoping he’ll let me back inside sometime before winter,” Steve says to Bucky, off-hand, and Bucky braces his arm against the wall, grinds his forehead into the back of his hand. The bones of his knuckles provide a pleasant sting.

“Easy,” Wilson says, scruffing the back of Bucky’s neck with one hand and pulling the phone away from Bucky's ear with the other.

“Steve, Stark’s a softie at heart,” Wilson tells him, confident and soothing. “He’d never leave you outside to freeze.”

Bucky doesn’t hear Steve’s reply, but whatever it is, Bucky knows Steve well enough by now to know it’s something sickeningly assenting and fond.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's all she wrote.
> 
> Thank you all — for reading and commenting and bookmarking and leaving kudos. I hope the ending appeals — as this story progressed, Bucky's headspace progressed with it, so the tone is not as eerily dark and foreboding as it used to be in the beginning. This is the ending I envisioned for them all along, and it's filtered through Bucky's eyes: we're not granted a full-blown view of Steve and Tony, but rest assured they're fine — or, more accurately speaking, they will be.


End file.
